The Public Eye (1992)

October 14, 1992

Review/Film: The Public Eye;
A Photographer Sees A City's Dark Side, But Not His Own

By VINCENT CANBY

Published: October 14, 1992

In "The Public Eye," set in 1942, Joe Pesci appears as a nervy, rude freelance photographer, Leon Bernstein, who's called Bernzy or the Great Bernzini by the editors and the cops with whom he deals. Bernzy has a way of arriving at the scene of a crime even before the police.

Armed with a Speed Graphic, the pockets of his trench coat bulging with flashbulbs and film, Bernzy roams nighttime Manhattan in search of the right subject. His specialties: mob rub-outs, tenement fires, celebrities caught off guard, servicemen and their girlfriends necking in doorways, automobile accidents, suicides and the anonymous faces of the sidewalk lookers-on. In his photographs these people speak.

Bernzy has an eye for detail. If the gunned-down body hasn't fallen to the pavement in a way that tells the story, he rearranges the pose, sometimes pushing the guy's hat into the frame. "People like to see the hat," he says.

His gift is to be able to freeze moments of hysteria, despair and loneliness into black-and-white images of arresting immediacy. Bernzy's tabloid pictures are vulgar, sensational and occasionally unforgettable.

Howard Franklin, who wrote and directed "The Public Eye," hasn't quite figured out how to dramatize the essence of a man as peculiarly gifted and obsessed as Bernzy, but at least he has created a rich character, whom Mr. Pesci plays with a furious, sweaty kind of authenticity.

Mr. Franklin seems to have been inspired by the life and work of the great Weegee, Arthur Fellig, whose photographs of New York in the 1940's defined the city for natives as well as those who had never seen it. Weegee's nickname, a corruption of Ouija, as in Ouija board, was apparently a reference to his uncanny way of turning up where the action was. Bernzy's dream in "The Public Eye" is to shoot a mob massacre not seconds after the victims have been turned into corpses, but as it happens.

Yet that's just part of the story of "The Public Eye," which tries to be both a 1940's film noir and a story about an artist's search for recognition. Bernzy wants a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art. He thinks it's time his photographs were collected and published between hard covers. He's also carrying on like a private eye, uncovering a scandal that involves both mob and Government figures in the black-market sale of gasoline ration stamps.

Bernzy is drawn into this mess by the beautiful, mysterious Kay Levitz (Barbara Hershey), who has inherited a Manhattan establishment like the Stork Club from her much older, recently deceased husband. When a man who is clearly a racketeer shows up one night to declare himself her partner, Kay seeks out Bernzy, sometimes known as photographer to the mob, to find out what's going on.

"The Public Eye" never quite takes off, either as romantic melodrama or as a consideration of one very eccentric man's means of self-expression. The facts are there, but they never add up to much. The psychology is rudimentary. Mr. Pesci's Bernzy is presented as a fellow who can see the world only in terms of the black-and-white pictures he takes. He protects his feelings behind the camera lens. That is, until he meets Kay.

This most tentative love story is not helped by the lack of sparks between the two people who play the lovers. For whatever reason, Mr. Pesci and Ms. Hershey were never made for each other. It doesn't help that Kay seems to make contact with Bernzy only when the script calls for her to admire his work as an artist. The movie strains too hard for too little effect and concludes with a sequence whose only sense is vaguely poetic.

Several members of the supporting cast stand out: Jared Harris, as the menacing, ambiguously motivated doorman at Kay's swank club; Stanley Tucci, as a mob stoolie, and Jerry Adler, who plays the only person Bernzy can trust.

"The Public Eye" was shot on location in Cincinnati, Chicago and Los Angeles, although it looks as authentic as the Chrysler Building, which goes to show (the Mayor's Office on Film, Theater and Broadcasting might note) that New York is not indispensable to movie makers.

Mr. Franklin shows the audience a lot of examples of work by Weegee and his contemporaries, including Weegee's classic shot made at the opening of the Metropolitan Opera in 1948: the arrival of Mrs. George Washington Kavanaugh and Lady Peel, two smiling grandes dames cloaked in ermine. Weegee studies them, front view and in full figure, as they in turn are studied by a skeptical bag lady, standing at the side and seen in profile.

Weegee's work is full of such double whammies. The movie's only double whammy is Mr. Pesci's demonstration of his own talent and the driven character he creates.